Alumni Win OAH Book Awards

The Organization of American Historians has honored Allyson Hobbs, PhD'09, and Kyle G. Volk, PhD'08, for scholarly and professional achievements in American history in 2015.

Allyson Hobbs's A Chosen Exile: A History of Racial Passing in American Life (Harvard, 2014) received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award (for a first scholarly book and the Lawrence W. Levine Award (for best book in American cultural history). The Turner committee citation reads: "This elegantly written volume illuminates the complexities of the double helix of race and identity in American life as few others do and richly deserves the acclaim of historians of the American experience." Allyson is an assistant professor of history at Stanford University. Thomas C. Holt directed her dissertation and George Chauncey and Jacqueline Stewart, PhD'99 (English), were readers.

Kyle Volk's Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford, 2014) received the Merle Curti Award (for the best book published in American intellectual history). "This imaginatively conceived and intelligently argued book," the committee noted, "reveals the subtle and dynamic interplay between political thought and political practice." He also received an honorable mention for the Frederick Jackson Turner Award. Kyle is an associate professor of history at the University of Montana. Amy Dru Stanley and William Novak directed his dissertation and Kathleen Neils Conzen was a reader.